Distance Education in Transition - Master of Distance Education ...

The Educational Paradigm Shifts
campus-based universities. They will engage in digital learning as well. Students there
will also learn how comfortable it is to use central resources by Internet and how useful
it is to become members of virtual communities of students. Sooner or later they will
start to manage learning processes of their own by tele-learning as well (Collis, 1996).
In this way a convergence of the methods of campus-based and distance teaching
universities will become possible (Tait & Mills, 1999).
The university of the future will use and integrate a great number of forms of presentations,
face-to-face, at a distance and digital, and will thus develop new pedagogical
configurations which will no longer resemble traditional forms of teaching. This
university will be open to younger as well as to older adults who will be able to start,
interrupt, continue and finish their studies whenever it suits them. They will not have to
be present at these universities all the time, perhaps only for shorter periods. These
universities of the future will also be variable, adaptive and flexible enough to provide
tailor-made programmes for all kinds of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as
for persons who want to continue their education at the tertiary level.
This vision of the university of the future indicates how important the educational
paradigm shifts dealt with in this chapter really are. Teachers must not only be aware of
this fundamental change, but of the necessity to become active agents of this change. At
the same time they have to assume responsibility because they must function as
protectors of their students against those technological forces which overdo the
mechanisation of education just in order to make more profit. Teachers must be on the
alert as they must protest and react when the unnecessary exaggeration of technological
enthusiasm dehumanises the processes of teaching and learning and thus becomes
detrimental to education.
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